Monitor - October 2015

quality, and are familiar with how to perform self-studies and collect data on student outcomes — key factors when pursuing APPIC membership and APA accreditation.

“When you incorporate that type of skill level with the school district trainers and administration, it makes for a winning team and substantially increases the probability of APPIC approval and APA accreditation,” Reddy says.

The grants are designed to cover expenditures such as APPIC membership application and National Match fees, consortium fees and expenses such as meetings with collaborative school districts and the consultation costs involved in generating written plans. In addition, the grant program provides guidance on how to access free consultation services with APA and other national organizations and outlets for federal funding through grant competition.

“We’re really trying to get people in the very early stages of
developing these internships,” Reddy says. “Other APA grants
are available to help programs that are further along in the
accreditation process.”
One of this year’s grantees is the Boston Schools Internship
program, a collaboration being developed among the University
of Massachusetts Boston, William James College, Boston
Public Schools and Boston Children’s Hospital. Led by Melissa
Pearrow, PhD, a school psychology professor at the University
of Massachusetts Boston, the team used its grant money to hire
consultants to help evaluate plans for building a consortium
that bridges school, community clinic and hospital internships
placements.

“We’ve found that there’s such a profound need for school-
based placements because there’s so much prevention and early
intervention work available there,” Pearrow says. She specifically
highlights the need for working with teachers, families and kids
before problems begin, in an effort to avoid the need for more
intensive services. “That’s really different from the opportunities
in clinic-based programs.”
Hughes also notes that a unique feature of school psychology
training is the delivery of services to prevent child difficulties
before symptoms result in impaired or disordered academic or
behavioral performance.

In addition, Pearrow says, not having APA-accredited internships is undermining students’ ability to gain licensure, “and these are critical things for our professional identities and access.”

Learning by example

Along with financial backing, Pearrow and her team are also being mentored by psychologists who are already running successful school-based internship consortiums. For example, Schmitt, who is one of the mentors, teamed with psychologist Sally Hoover, PhD, pupil services director for the Quaker Valley School District just outside of Pittsburgh, to form the Pittsburgh Psychology Internship Consortium. This consortium enrolled interns for a third year in August and received APPIC approval last year. The consortium provides slots for five school-based interns and plans to pursue APA accreditation in the coming years.

An even greater internship success story is the Illinois School Psychology Internship Consortium (ISPIC), which has provided nearly 200 APA-accredited school-based psychology internships for students from approximately 50 universities since 2002. Its four partners are the school psychology programs of Illinois State University, Loyola University at Chicago, Northern Illinois University and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. This consortium was developed after the training programs noticed that most of their school psychology doctoral students who wanted to be licensed were leaving the state to complete internships, says Brenda Huber, PhD, ISPIC’s training director and another mentor. The consortium began with two interns in 2002, and this fall, it is providing school-based internships throughout the state for 26 school psychology doctoral students. Most of the consortium’s graduates continue to work at least part-time in schools, though many also work in private practice, clinic or hospital settings and academia, according to Huber. Several have also gone on to work with their schools to join the consortium.

Before ISPIC started, there were few licensed school psychologists in Illinois, and they were mostly in affluent suburbs, Huber recalls. “Now they’re everywhere and they’re bringing best practices to underserved communities and really changing the quality of education and mental health services available to children across the state,” she says. n

2015 recipients of the
Grant Program for School
Psychology Internships

• Avondale Elementary School District School Psychology Internship through the University of Arizona

• Boston Schools Internship through the University of Massachusetts Boston, William James College, Boston Public Schools and Boston Children’s Hospital